H IS T ORY OF T H E H UMA N S C I E N C E S

Vol. 23 No. 1

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[23:1; 1–10; DOI: 10.1177/0952695109354395]

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Neuroscience, power and culture: an introduction SCOTT VRECKO

ABSTRACT In line with their vast expansion over the last few decades, the brain sciences – including neurobiology, psychopharmacology, biological psychiatry, and brain imaging – are becoming increasingly prominent in a variety of cultural formations, from self-help guides and the arts to advertising and public health programmes. This article, which introduces the special issue of History of the Human Science on ‘Neuroscience, Power and Culture’, considers the ways that social and historical research can, through empirical investigations grounded in the observation of what is actually happening and has already happened in the sciences of mind and brain, complement speculative discussions of the possible social implications of neuroscience that now appear regularly in the media and in philosophical bioethics. It suggests that the neurosciences are best understood in terms of their lineage within the ‘psy’-disciplines, and that, accordingly, our analyses of them will be strengthened by drawing on existing literatures on the history and politics of psychology – particularly those that analyze formations of knowledge, power and subjectivity associated with the discipline and its practical applications. Additionally, it argues against taking today’s neuroscientific facts and brain-targetting technologies as starting points for analysis, and for greater recognition of the ways that these are shaped by historical, cultural and political-economic forces. Key words biopolitics, brain, culture, neuroethics, neuroscience, power, psychopharmacology

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If the politics of the present are, to a significant extent, a politics of bodies, biologies and life – a politics in which social, personal and global questions increasingly come to involve conceptions and explanations of our selves and our societies in terms of the physiological – there can be little doubt that an increasingly important element of this politics involves the human brain (Blank, 1999; Connolly, 2002). Over the last few decades, the neurosciences have expanded dramatically, not only in terms of the resources they command and the authority they wield, but also in terms of the scope and range of problems and phenomena they territorialize. Among other things, brain scientists today offer us neurobiological accounts of: altruism (Gottschalk, 1995) borderline personality disorder (Pally, 2002) criminal behaviour (Glicksohn, 2002) decision-making (Bechara, 2001) empathy (Carr et al., 2003) fear (Kalin, 1993) gut feelings (Mayer et al., 2000) hope (Gottschalk et al., 1993) impulsivity (Stein et al., 1993) judgment (Greene and Haidt, 2002) kinship identification (Lundstrom et al., 2009) love (Marazziti, 2005) motivation (Bechara et al., 1992) neuroticism (Fischer et al., 1997) obesity (Markus, 2005) problem gambling (Potenza, 2001) racial bias (Knutson et al., 2007) suicide (Mann, 1998) trust (Zak et al., 2004) unconditional love (Beauregard et al., 2009) violence (Rutter, 2008) wisdom (Meeks and Jeste, 2009) yawning (Schürmann et al., 2005) (religious) zeal (Inzlicht et al., 2009) More broadly, beyond specific substantive domains, notions of what it means to be particular kinds of persons, populations and political subjects are increasingly bound up with the meanings, explanations and theories of contemporary neuroscience. In the most extreme and esoteric forms of ‘neuroreductionism’ (Martin, 2004), philosophers and scientists assert that we are who we are because of what our brains do; that we act the ways we do, feel the things we feel, think what we think, and like what we like because of the

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structures of specific neurons and activities of chemicals inside our heads (cf. Churchland, 1989). In terms of everyday life and culture, ideas about the brain, neurochemistry and the biological basis of mental life are far from hegemonic, but are nevertheless becoming increasingly salient cultural phenomena, particularly as they circulate nationally and globally through a range of media – from TV shows (Campbell, forthcoming), drug advertisements (Lacasse and Leo, 2005) and self-help books (e.g. Schwartz, 1997), to the arts (Wingate and Kwint, 2006), popular fiction (e.g. Franzen, 2001), and public health campaigns (e.g. NIDA, n.d.). The flourishing of these neurocultural forms lends support to Ian Hacking’s (2004) prediction that, for a number of reasons including growing concern from an ageing population about cognitive decline in old age and the flourishing of new technologies which have made it possible to gain insight on the brain’s sub-cellular structures and processes, the brain sciences ‘will be the most popular science of the early twenty-first century’. Certainly, they are increasingly popular subjects of investigation for scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and particularly for philosophers. While Hacking has engaged with the neurosciences from an empirical perspective (particularly in relation to neurobiological explanations of psychiatric illnesses; see, for example, Hacking, 1998; Hacking, 1999), a great deal of philosophical and, most recently, bioethical work that has begun to examine some of the implications of developments in the neurosciences is often more speculative than concrete. A key focus here has been questions about what new forms of neuroscience and neurotechnology might develop in the years and decades to come, and about what possible consequences these potentially emergent forms of brain technoscience might have for the law, self-understandings, conceptions of normality, and so on. Although these reflections are important, it is also crucial to note that we do not have to rely on prospective analysis alone – for the brain sciences have long been influencing personal, social and political life, and a significant amount of empirical work has been done within the social sciences and humanities that provides a basis for thinking concretely about the place of neuroscience in contemporary cultures and politics, as well as the place of culture and politics in contemporary neuroscience (Dumit, 2004; Harrington, 1987; Harrington, 1992; Healy, 1997; Lock, 2002). Moreover, if we assume that the brain sciences – particularly those relating to psychopharmacology and biopsychiatry – are best understood in terms of their ‘psy’-lineage (i.e. that understandings of the ‘neuro’ disciplines can be informed by an awareness of their relation to the histories of the psychological arts and sciences), there is a vast range of literature on the human sciences (Foucault, 1985; Foucault, 1989; Goffman, 1968; Rieff, 1987; Rose, 1996; Rose, 1999; Shorter, 1997) that has considerable potential for contributing to such analyses – even if the works do not specifically mention neurotransmitters, fMRI equipment, and other neuroscientific objects.

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The collection of articles in this special issue stems from a workshop that took place at Harvard University in May 2008, entitled ‘Our Brains, Our Selves?’, which sought to bring together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences whose work examines what is actually happening, and has already happened, in brain science and technology (and whose analyses are informed by the insights of a range of existing theoretical and analytical perspectives on the human sciences).1 Over two and a half days, about 25 participants from Europe and North America gathered in Cambridge, MA to present works in progress and to discuss the ways that grounded, culturally contextualized studies of neuroscience might contribute to analyzing the ethical problems, individual practices and social problematics that have often (too often, some participants suggested) been the subject of speculative, abstract analyses that are insufficiently informed by social and cultural research. Certainly, not all philosophical and bioethical work is completely abstract; and indeed, few if any participants considered purely conceptual analysis to be without value. But the general feeling was that empirically grounded studies could offer valuable, complementary and sometimes unique insights into the neuroscience-related issues that are increasingly grabbing popular and academic imaginations (for example, those relating to neuroscience insights into the nature of free will and consciousness, and the possibility of using brain-scanning technology to detect lies and terrorists). Participants also expressed hopes that this sort of social research might help to expand the scope of analyses beyond a consideration of the ‘social implications’ of neuroscience, to a broader and more complex investigation of the ways that the brain sciences are, and have always been, inextricably embedded in historical, cultural, political and economic formations. Indeed, if there is a key theme that draws together the workshop presentations, and the following articles, it is that the facts, theories and practices that emerge from brain research are always cultural and historical products, with particular political and economic trajectories – and should be analyzed as such. This is not to suggest that the articles collected here attempt to stake or verify general philosophical claims about the nature of, and relations between, neuroscience knowledge, power and culture. As the reader will see, a recognition of the socio-cultural embeddedness of neuroscience is only a starting point for analyses. From there, the investigations move on to demonstrate, through the use of a range of methods, case studies and analytic perspectives, the concrete ways that neuroscience and knowledge politics play out in specific spheres, and in relation to particular issues, understandings and social forms. The opening article, by Joelle Abi-Rached and Nikolas Rose, takes a broad historical and comparative approach, offering a genealogical investigation of contemporary forms of neuroscience by examining how ‘neuroscience’ itself came into being as a distinct field of inquiry over the course of the second

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half of the 20th century and how, along with it, there emerged a distinct new style of thought that they term the ‘neuromolecular gaze’. Rather than offer a traditional historical account that provides a linear and progressive story – and that is implicitly or explicitly based on the assumption that scientific work simply uncovers the unchanging truths of the brain – the analysis provided by Abi-Rached and Rose demonstrates that the emergence of the neurosciences was far from inevitable, and was closely tied to a range of interpersonal, institutional and professional conditions. Insofar as they develop a comparative analysis of some of the similarities and differences in neuroscientific genealogies in three national contexts (the UK, the USA and France), they also bring into question the assumption that we might tell a single, neat story about the emergence of a discipline that they suggest is a ‘hybrid of hybrids’. In a sharp but complementary contrast to Abi-Rached and Rose’s broad historical and comparative study, the paper by anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz offers insights into the socially contingent nature of neuroscientific knowledge through a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of a Swiss laboratory that investigates the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on human subjects. Langlitz challenges the ‘objectivist façade’ he attributes to contemporary psychopharmacology by demonstrating how, in a range of mundane and practical ways – from the design and refinement of experimental studies, to the measurement of drug effects – the subjectivity of both researchers and their subjects persistently enters into the observed phenomena and the ‘hard facts’ and understandings produced in research laboratories. Langlitz also alludes, briefly, to broader socio-political issues that have influenced hallucinogen research in his and other research sites – most notably, the politicization of the hallucinogens in the 1960s and the reconstruction of the field of hallucinogen research since the ‘Decade of the Brain’ (see also Langlitz, forthcoming). Such intersections, between cultural politics and the social production of neuroscientific knowledge, come to the fore in Linsey McGoey’s exploration of controversies surrounding the efficacy of antidepressant drugs such as Prozac and Zoloft. While McGoey, like Langlitz, offers an account of the contingency of the facts we have about drug effects (in McGoey’s case, legal pharmaceuticals rather than illicit hallucinogens), she focuses on how such issues relate to professional and regulatory matters that arise as scientists and government agencies attempt to negotiate the always incomplete and uncertain knowledge they have of psychopharmacological interventions. Her article not only offers insights into the politics of method and interpretation associated with a class of brain-targetting drugs that millions of individuals take worldwide, but also helps deepen our understandings of the epistemological foundations of the system of evidence-based medicine (EBM) that is dominant in the USA, the UK, and many other countries. Moreover, at the same time that McGoey calls into question the

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widely held assumption that randomized controlled clinical trials (the ‘gold standard’ for producing knowledge in EBM) are capable of generating valuefree information about pharmaceuticals, she also illuminates the cultural and political factors that allow for EBM and clinical trials to retain their dominance despite – and possibly because of – their ‘profitable failures’. The article by Nikolas Rose shifts emphasis from the ways that politics and culture influence knowledge production, toward a consideration of the way that neuroscience and behavioural genetics are involved in changing the contemporary politics of ‘madness’ and ways of governing risky psychiatric and legal subjects. Rose undertakes the important task of considering the impact that emerging forms of neuroscience may have on reshaping formations of legal justice and social control. But, in contrast with many reflections on the legal implications of neuroscience (such as those associated with the fields of ‘neuroethics’ and ‘neurolaw’) that focus on abstract and philosophical questions (e.g. about what would happen to criminal law if neuroscientific findings were able to eliminate our ideas about free will), he begins by examining developments and issues that have already arisen, in the real world. This allows him to select, from among the virtually infinite set of possibilities that might arise from advances in neuroscience, those that actually seem likely to arise – and are thus arguably the most important to take seriously. Moreover, Rose avoids the temptation to examine new forms of knowledge and technology as if they can be understood apart from how they are practically put to work. As he notes in relation to endeavours to improve the identification and pre-emptive management of ‘dangerous’ individuals, the social implications of advances in biopsychiatry depend as much on social and cultural contexts (his case highlights the ‘culture of precaution’ and media-fed fears of victimization by particular psychiatric kinds) as on the technical and substantive properties of its interventions. The final article, by Jonna Brenninkmeijer, also addresses a topic that has received considerable attention in the media and in bioethical analyses – namely, that of ‘brain enhancement’. Like that of Rose, her article avoids free-floating speculation by grounding its analysis firmly in the actualities of social life. Thus, while bioethicists (and so-called ‘transhumanists’) spend considerable time wondering about the implications of new and developing neurotechnologies, and often focus on the abstract and arguably mythical notion of becoming ‘posthuman’, Brenninkmeijer examines the rather mundane ways that individuals relate to brain-targetting interventions as they attempt to improve themselves and/or manage the problems they face in everyday life. At the same time that Brenninkmeijer provides a wealth of ethnographic material that illuminates the everyday perspectives of those who use different kinds of brain-targeting interventions (not to mention those who profit from their consumption), she also deploys this material as a basis for revisiting, from a concrete standpoint, conceptual ideas about the inter-

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connectedness of human bodies, minds and subjectivities that have been of central philosophical concern for thinkers from Descartes through to Foucault, up to contemporary neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio. One of the main reasons for organizing the workshop that gave rise to this collection was the goal of bringing together researchers who are empirically investigating the social, cultural, political and economic aspects of the neurosciences. Taken as a whole, the articles in this collection (along with other workshop papers that do not appear here) demonstrate that, when considering the relationship between the neurosciences and society, we need not rely on tentative speculation alone, but can draw upon a significant and growing body of work that demonstrates what is actually happening in concrete contexts, in relation to particular social and scientific problems.

NOTES For making possible the ‘Our Brains, Our Selves’ workshop, and hence this collection, I would like to thank Rebecca Lemov, my workshop co-organizer; Harvard’s Department of the History of Science, and in particular Anne Harrington; and members of the BIOS Centre at the London School of Economics (LSE) who helped with organization and planning, including Caitlin Connors, Giovanni Frazzetto, Linsey McGoey and Nikolas Rose. The workshop was generously funded by the European Science Foundation through its support of the European Neuroscience and Society Network, by Harvard’s Department of the History of Science, and by the ESRC Brain, Self and Society programme based in the LSE’s BIOS Centre. 1

The article co-authored by Abi-Rached and Rose, and the article by Brenninkmeijer, were not presented at the workshop.

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NEUROSCIENCE, POWER & CULTURE: AN INTRODUCTION Lock, M. M. (2002) Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lundstrom, J. N., Boyle, J. A., Zatorre, R. J. and Jones-Gotman, M. (2009) ‘The Neuronal Substrates of Human Olfactory Based Kin Recognition’, Human Brain Mapping 30(8): 2571–80. Mann, J. J. (1998) ‘The Neurobiology of Suicide’, Nature Medicine 4(1): 25–30. Marazziti, D. (2005) ‘The Neurobiology of Love’, Current Psychiatry Reviews 1(3): 331–5. Markus, A. (2005) ‘Neurobiology of Obesity’, Nature Neuroscience 8(5): 551. Martin, E. (2004) ‘Talking back to Neuro-Reductionism’, in H. Thomas and J. Ahmed (eds) Cultural Bodies: Ethnography and Theory. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Mayer, E. A., Naliboff, B. and Munakata, J. (2000) ‘The Evolving Neurobiology of Gut Feelings’, Progress in Brain Research 122: 195–206. Meeks, T. W. and Jeste, D. V. (2009) ‘Neurobiology of Wisdom: a Literature Overview’, Archives of General Psychiatry 66(4): 355–65. NIDA (n.d.) ‘Brain Power! The NIDA Junior Scientist Program’, Rockville, MD: National Institute on Drug Abuse; see: http://www.nida.nih.gov/JSP2/JSP.html Pally, R. (2002) ‘The Neurobiology of Borderline Personality Disorder: the Synergy of “Nature and Nurture”’, Journal of Psychiatric Practice 8(3): 133–42. Potenza, M. N. (2001) ‘The Neurobiology of Pathological Gambling’, Seminars in Clinical Neuropsychiatry 6: 217–26. Rieff, P. (1987) The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Rose, N. S. (1996) Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Rose, N. S. (1999) Governing the Soul: the Shaping of the Private Self. London: Free Association Books. Rutter, M. (2008) ‘The Neurobiology of Violence: Implications for Prevention and Treatment. Introduction’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 363(1503): 2485–9. Schürmann, M., Hesse, M. D., Stephan, K. E., Saarela, M., Zilles, K., Hari, R. and Fink, G. R. (2005) ‘Yearning to Yawn: the Neural Basis of Contagious Yawning’, NeuroImage 24(4): 1260–4. Schwartz, J. M. (1997) Brain Lock: Free Yourself from Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior. New York: Harper Perennial. Shorter, E. (1997) A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac. New York: Wiley. Stein, D. J., Hollander, E. and Liebowitz, M. R. (1993) ‘Neurobiology of Impulsivity and the Impulse Control Disorders’, Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 5(1): 9–17. Wingate, R. and Kwint, M. (2006) ‘Imagining the Brain Cell: the Neuron in Visual Culture’, Nature Reviews Neuroscience 7(9): 745–52. Zak, P. J., Kurzban, R. and Matzner, W. T. (2004) ‘The Neurobiology of Trust’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1032: 224–7.

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE SCOTT VRECKO is a Lecturer in the Department of Sociology & Philosophy at the University of Exeter. His research focuses on the relationship between science, knowledge and power, particularly in relation to processes of social change and the governance of social problems. He is currently writing a book on these themes for New York University Press.

Address: Department of Sociology & Philosophy, University of Exeter, Amory Building, Rennes Drive, Exeter, Devon EX4 4RJ, UK. [email: [email protected]]